Ren had expected the tunnel behind Kanda Station to end in concrete or rusted maintenance doors. Instead, it opened into a corridor of silence and impossible architecture—walls lined with memoryglass, a floor of ticking brass tiles, and light that seemed to pour in from nowhere.
Ayane walked ahead of him, each step precise, as though she'd memorized the path.
> "Where are we?" Ren asked, shard still clutched in his palm.
> "Someplace that shouldn't exist anymore. The edge of a paradox seam. This is the Museum of Forgotten Days."
Ren stared around in awe. Floating along the corridor were suspended moments—bubbles of time like frozen dioramas. He passed one where a child reached for a balloon just out of reach. Another showed a woman screaming into a phone as rain poured sideways through a broken sky.
> "These aren't dreams, are they?"
> "No," Ayane said. "They're discarded realities. Bits of days that were overwritten when timelines fractured. When you broke the hourglass."
Ren winced. "You say that like it was a bad thing."
> "It wasn't wrong. But it had consequences. Time used to follow rules. Now it has to improvise."
At the end of the hall stood a circular vault door, a ring of rotating numbers and glyphs slowly aligning. Ayane pressed her hand to a shimmering panel. The mark on her temple pulsed in sync, and the vault hissed open.
Inside was a vast chamber that looked like a temple smashed into a library—books stacked between hanging gears, holograms flickering above crumbling statues. The air carried the scent of old electricity and forgotten paper.
In the center, beneath a slowly turning gyroscope the size of a house, stood a console made of obsidian and mirrored steel. Its surface displayed a massive map: a globe dotted with red spirals, each one labeled with a time signature.
Ren stepped closer.
> "What are these?"
> "Threadwraith sightings. And new anomalies we haven't even categorized yet."
> "We?"
A familiar voice spoke behind him.
> "Told you he'd ask that."
Ren turned—and saw Kaelen, the half-clockwork girl from Adessia, her brass arm gleaming beneath the chamber lights. She wore a long leather coat now, patched with Chronoguardian symbols crossed out in red.
> "Kaelen?! How—"
> "Same as you. I didn't die when time collapsed—I fragmented. Landed in a timeline just unstable enough to let me slip back here."
She tapped the console and the display shifted to a new screen: a fracture chart, showing crisscrossing lines of reality, some blinking, some dark.
> "We've been tracking you since the reset. It wasn't easy. You bounce like a stone across water."
> "How long has it been?" Ren asked, suddenly afraid of the answer.
> "Subjectively?" Ayane said. "About three weeks. Objectively? Could be decades. Depends on which timeline you check."
Ren felt a headache brewing behind his eyes.
> "And you've been here the whole time?"
> "Not just here," Ayane said. "We've been building something."
She led him to a massive viewing platform at the edge of the chamber. Below, a glowing model of the Temporal Web hovered—thousands of nodes connected by threads of light, some pulsing strong, others flickering erratically.
Ayane pointed to a dark cluster near the center.
> "That's where it began unraveling. We call it the Nullcore Scar. The reset left a vacuum. Time tried to fill it, but without direction, it turned inward. Ate itself."
> "The Threadwraith from the station…"
>"Was just the first. There are more now. Wraiths, anomalies, even phantoms—people from dead timelines who don't know they're ghosts."
Kaelen handed Ren a device—a thin bracelet with a gear-shaped interface.
> "You're going to need that."
> "What is it?"
> "A Chrono-Splice Regulator. It keeps your presence from destabilizing weaker timelines. You're too much of an anomaly now—unshielded, you warp everything around you."
> "Great," Ren muttered. "I'm radioactive time garbage."
Kaelen grinned. "Basically."
They returned to the console, where Ayane pulled up a new file.
A face appeared on screen—pale, sharp-eyed, with long white hair and a golden monocle embedded into one eye.
> "This," she said grimly, "is Margrave Vellian, self-declared Curator of Time."
> "Sounds charming."
> "He wasn't real. Not until after the reset. He rose out of one of the fracture pockets—claims to be the rightful heir of 'Unified Time'. He's gathering survivors, anomalies, even Threadwraiths, offering them a new 'perfect chronology' under his rule."
Ren frowned. "So… a timeline dictator?"
> "More like a temporal cult leader with an army of paradoxes."
Kaelen leaned in. "He's got tech we don't understand. Devices that stabilize timelines just enough to rewrite them. Whole cities now run on his doctrine."
Ren stared at the map again. The red spirals were spreading.
> "And you need me to stop him."
> "We need you to find him," Ayane said. "He's searching for something. Something only you might understand."
She tapped the screen. A new image appeared: a symbol etched into stone.
Ren's stomach dropped.
It was the Clockwitch's seal.
> "We found that in a fractured reality adjacent to Tokyo-05A," Kaelen explained. "It was buried beneath a collapsed temple. Guarded by nullbeasts and chronovores."
> "Clockwitch tech," Ayane said. "But older. Pre-Adessian. Ancient."
> "I thought she was gone."
> "She is. But her work isn't."
Kaelen adjusted the map again. "Vellian's agents are hunting for something called the Core Cipher. We think it's the original keystone used to build Adessia."
> "If he finds it," Ayane said, "he could overwrite every timeline. Permanently."
Ren stared at the shard in his hand. It had stopped ticking hours ago—but now, faintly, he felt it pulling toward something. A resonance.
> "I can find him," Ren said. "But I need my memories back. All of them."
Ayane hesitated. "We thought you might say that."
She led him to a side chamber—bare, circular, with walls covered in symbols that shifted when looked at directly. In the center stood a chair of copper and quartz, wrapped in cables that pulsed like veins.
> "This is the Recollector," Kaelen said. "It's based on Clockwitch memory extraction tech. It'll dig deep. But…"
> "But?"
> "It might show you more than you want to see."
Ayane added, "You didn't just reset the timeline. You merged with it. Some parts of you… aren't human anymore."
Ren looked at them both. "I've already seen myself die a dozen ways. What's one more truth?"
He sat in the chair. The Recollector whirred to life. Cables attached themselves gently to his temple, spine, wrists. Kaelen stood at the console. Ayane placed a steadying hand on his shoulder.
> "We'll pull you back if it gets too deep."
> "Don't," Ren said. "If I scream, it means it's working."
The machine pulsed—and then, everything went white.
Inside the Recollector
He stood in a hallway of mirrors.
Each reflected a different version of him—some monstrous, others regal, many broken. He walked past them until he came to a door marked with the seal of the Clockwitch.
It opened on its own.
Inside, he saw her again—standing in a field of ticking flowers, gears turning overhead like constellations.
> "Ren," she said softly. "You've come home."
> "You're dead."
> "Not in memory. Not in echo. You shattered my hourglass, but my imprint remains. You're built from my design. You always were."
> "Why?"
> "Because I needed a choice. And you were it."
She extended her hand. A gear hovered above her palm. Inscribed with strange symbols.
> "Take it. The first part of the Core Cipher."
> "Why me?"
> "Because no one else could decide what time meant anymore."
He reached out—and the gear burned his hand as he touched it.
His vision exploded.
Back in Reality
Ren gasped, eyes snapping open. He was still in the chair. Ayane and Kaelen stood nearby, tense.
> "You were under for hours," Kaelen said.
Ren opened his palm.
The gear was there.
Real.
Still hot.
Ayane stared at it, then at him.
> "You found it. Part of the Cipher."
> "And I know where to find the rest."
---
End of Chapter 12
Next: Chapter 13 – "The Temple Between Tomorrows"